2. If employees don't think an hour of their time is worth it to work for us, then they are clearly not a fit. Those people obviously don't value working for us. We have the easiest, fastest, most painless interview process of any company I have ever worked at, by design. We don't do whiteboard questions, we don't do 8 hour multi-person tech review days, we don't ask odd l33tcode questions or brain teasers, we don't make you wait weeks to hear back from us, we never ghost anyone, and we usually give a decision within 72 hours. Asking an hour to prove you can code seems perfectly reasonable given most companies ask for significantly more of your time. Every employer I've worked at before took up 2-5x as much time interviewing as we do. If that hour is what is preventing you from working for us, go work somewhere else as it tells me a lot about you and how much you'll value working for us.

3. I apologize for that. It was uncalled for.

Maybe you just haven't hired or worked with someone who can't code yet.

It's not the liars that are being filtered out (they're easy to detect), but its those who genuinely believe they are good developers.

They had a take home. Ridiculously simple. Build a 4 endpoint CRUD API for bear sightings. Took about 20 minutes in Python Flask. Sent it in, immediately moved to the next round which was two weeks away.

You know what I did in those two weeks? I rebuilt the same API in Node, Typescript, Rust, Go, C++, Ruby, Django, Sanic, and I think a few more.

Then I deployed it on App Engine, Lambda, EC2, Google VM, Kubernetes, Elastic Beanstalk, ECS, and my local home dual Xeon server. (while keeping the compute size of all of the cloud offerings as equal as possible)

Then I benchmarked them all. Turns out how you deployed it made little difference but the language made a huge difference. Sanic came in 2nd place while Rust was far and away the winner.

Then I wrote a 10 page report including my methods, code, charts, and tables showing the results.

Two weeks later when I arrived at my onsite interview, I was scheduled to meet with 8 people for 8 hours to talk BS l33tcode questions. You know what I did? Explained what I had spent my time doing. They loved it.

I got a very nice offer that day and worked there for 3 years.

Sometimes the amount of effort you show a company how much you want to work there is what can land you the job.

I didn't ask to be paid for that time and I was employed elsewhere. I did this in the evenings and weekends during what would otherwise be social media downtime.....and it was fun. I explored new technologies, learned several new languages, and expanded my abilities as a developer. I don't regret that time investment one bit.

And you're saying you can't take one hour to do a take home?

That DOES tell me a lot about you.

edit: To be clear, this didn't take away from any of my other activities. I still ate out, spent time with friends, went out, etc.. This just took away from useless social media time and turned it into something productive. I also had a lot of fun not only exploring everything but also knowing I'd have a lock on a well compensated position and be in control of my interviews instead of their potentially being disinterested in just another candidate. It was time very well spent. I don't nearly expect this kind of investment from any of our applicants but if someone demonstrated they wanted to work for me that much you'd bet I'd hire them.

edit 2: I was also told later that numerous applicants struggled with this take home assignment despite it being literal CS 101 level stuff. That's why getting a sense of it someone can code is so important.